gilles kepel, we have to end there but thank you for being on hardtalk. my pleasure. good morning. wednesday was a dry, settled, sunny day for most of us and we have some weather watchers pictures which help to illustrate that point, as you can see in worcester, with blue skies and sunshine, and also in the london area. these two places were the hotspots through the day, with 26 celsius. it's worth just pointing out though, in wednesday's satellite picture we had some cloud up into the far north—west and by the end of the day we also had some sea fog through the irish sea. now that is going to be a bit of a nuisance over the next few hours and linger during the early morning. it is going to be a pretty muggy start to the day as well, temperatures widely into the mid—high teens. so there's only one place for those temparatures to go, when we get that sunshine coming through. the fog will take its time to clear but it will do so and as we go through the morning, it will be a beautiful picture. a little bit of fairweather cloud developing into the afternoon, which may wel

my guest is gilles kepel, a french expert on islamist terrorism, whose work has attracted worldwide attention

in his latest book, "terror in france: the rise of jihad in the west," paris-based scholar gilles kepel delves into the undercurrents of these attacks. i recently spoke to kepel here in the studio. what's happening in france? why is it different than the rest of europe in terms of these attacks? >> well, it's different because, as you said, we have 239 dead. the reason why we focused on france is we thought we could take the french hostage. they thought the more attacks there would be, then the more people would vote for the extreme right because they felt that way. so you have to remember that the terrorist jihadist wants to politicize other muslims, and they want to sort of wring them under their banner, because most of our muslim come patriots just loathe them and hate them. but they want to say, the french are racist, the french vote for the extreme right, therefore the only way for you to be safe in europe is to rally with us and sew jihad and civil strife in europe. this third-generation jihadism, which i describe in my book "terror in france," thinks that europe is the soft under